While we thus lightly dismiss sensual love as unpoetical, we must remember that Burns, in some of his accounts of inspiration, ascribes quite as powerful and as unidealistic an effect to the kisses of the barmaids, as to the liquor they dispense. But this is mere bravado, as much of his other verse shows. Byron's case, also, is a doubtful one. The element of discontent is all that elevates his amours above the "swinish trough," which Alfred Austin asserts them to be. [Footnote: InOff Mesolonghi.] Yet, such as his idealism is, it constitutes the strength and weakness of his poetical gift. Landor well says, [Footnote: InLines To a Lady.]
Although by fits so dense a cloud of smokePuffs from his sappy and ill-seasoned oak,Yet, as the spirit of the dream draws near,Remembered loves make Byron's self sincere.The puny heart within him swells to view,The man grows loftier and the poet too.
Ideal love is most likely to become articulate in the sonnet sequence. The Platonic theory of love and beauty, ubiquitous in renaissance sonnets, is less pretentiously but no less sincerely present in the finest sonnets of the last century. The sense that the beauty of his beloved is that of all other fair forms, the motive of Shakespeare's
Thy bosom is endeared with all heartsWhich I by lacking have supposed dead,
is likewise the motive of Rossetti'sHeart's Compass,
Sometimes thou seemest not as thyself alone,But as the meaning of all things that are;A breathless wonder, shadowing forth afarSome heavenly solstice, hushed and halcyon,Whose unstirred lips are music's visible tone;Whose eyes the sungates of the soul unbar,Being of its furthest fires oracular,The evident heart of all life sown and mown.
Thus also Mrs. Browning says of her earlier ideal loves,
Their shining fronts,Their songs, their splendors (better, yet the same,As river water hallowed into founts)Met in thee.[Footnote:Sonnets of the Portuguese, XXVI.]
Reflection of this sort almost inevitably leads the poet to the conviction that his real love is eternal beauty. Such is the progress of Rossetti's thought inHeart's Hope:
Lady, I fain would tell how evermoreThy soul I know not from thy body norThee from myself, neither our love from God.
The whole of Diotima's theory of the ascent to ideal beauty is here implicit in three lines. In the same spirit Christina Rossetti identifies her lover with her Christian faith:
Yea, as I apprehend it, love is suchI cannot love you if I love not Him,I cannot love Him if I love not you.[Footnote:Monna Innominata, VI. See also Robert Bridges,The ofLove(a sonnet sequence).]
It is obvious that, from the standpoint of the beloved at least, there is danger in this identification of all beauties as manifestations of the ideal. It is unpropitious to lifelong affection for one person. As a matter of fact, though the English taste for decorous fidelity has affected some poets, on the whole they have not hesitated to picture their race as fickle. Plato's account of the second step in the ascent of the lover, "Soon he will himself perceive that the beauty of one form is truly related to the beauty of another; and then if beauty in general is his pursuit, how foolish would he be not to recognize that the beauty in every form is one and the same," [Footnote:Symposium, Jowett translation, §210.] is made by Shelley the justification of his shifting enthusiasms, which the world so harshly censured. InEpipsychidionShelley declares,
I never was attached to that great sectWhose doctrine is that each one should selectOut of the crowd a mistress or a friend,And all the rest, though fair and wise, commendTo cold oblivion….
True love in this differs from gold and clay,That to divide is not to take away.Love is like understanding, that grows brightGazing on many truths….
Narrow the heart that loves, the brain that contemplates,The life that wears, the spirit that createsOne object and one form, and builds therebyA sepulchre for its eternity.
These last lines suggest, what many poets have asserted, that the goddess of beauty is apt to change her habitation from one clay to another, and that the poet who clings to the fair form after she has departed, is nauseated by the dead bones which he clasps. [Footnote: See Thomas Hardy's novel,The Well Beloved.] This theme Rupert Brooke is constantly harping upon, notably inDead Men's Love, which begins,
There was a damned successful poet,There was a woman like the Sun.And they were dead. They did not know it.They did not know his hymnsWere silence; and her limbsThat had served love so well,Dust, and a filthy smell.
The feeling that Aphrodite is leading them a merry chase through manyforms is characteristic of our ultra-modern poets, who anticipate at least one new love affair a year. Most elegantly Ezra Pound expresses his feeling that it is time to move on to a fresh inspiration:
As a bathtub lined with white porcelainWhen the hot water gives out or goes tepid,—So is the slow cooling of our chivalrous passion,My much praised, but not altogether satisfactory lady.
As each beautiful form is to be conceived of as reflecting eternal beauty from a slightly different angle, the poet may claim that flitting affection is necessary to one who would gain as complete as possible vision of ideality. Not only so, but this glimpsing of beauty through first one mistress, then another, often seems to perform the function of the mixed metaphor in freeing the soul from bondage to the sensual. This is the interpretation of Sappho's fickleness most popular with our writers, who give her the consciousness that Aphrodite, not flesh and blood, is the object of her quest. In her case, unlike that of the ordinary lover, the new passion does not involve the repudiation or belittling of the one before. In Swinburne'sAnactoriaSappho compares her sensations
Last year when I loved Atthis, and this yearWhen I love thee.
In Mackaye'sSappho and Phaon, when Alcaeus pleads for the love of the poetess, she asserts of herself,
I doubt if ever she saw form of manOr maiden either whom, being beautiful,She hath not loved.
When Alcaeus protests, "But not with passion!" she rejoins,
AllThat breathes to her is passion, love itselfAll passionate.
The inevitability of fickleness arising from her idealism, which fills her with insuperable discontent, is voiced most clearly by the nineteenth century Sappho through the lips of Sara Teasdale, in lines wherein she dismisses those who gossip about her:
How should they know that Sappho lived and diedFaithful to love, not faithful to the lover,Never transfused and lost in what she loved,Never so wholly loving nor at peace.I asked for something greater than I found,And every time that love has made me weepI have rejoiced that love could be so strong;For I have stood apart and watched my soulCaught in a gust of passion as a birdWith baffled wings against the dusty whirlwindStruggles and frees itself to find the sky.
She continues, apostrophizing beauty,
In many guises didst thou come to me;I saw thee by the maidens when they danced,Phaon allured me with a look of thine,In Anactoria I knew thy grace.I looked at Cercolas and saw thine eyes,But never wholly, soul and body mineDidst thou bid any love me as I loved.
The last two lines suggest another reason for the fickleness, as well as for the insatiability of the poet's love. If the poet's genius consists of his peculiar capacity for love, then in proportion as he outsoars the rest of humanity he will be saddened, if not disillusioned, by the half-hearted return of his love. Mrs. Browning characterizes her passion:
I love thee to the depth and breadth and heightMy soul can reach, when feeling out of sightFor the ends of Being and ideal grace.
It is clear that a lesser soul could not possibly give an adequate response to such affection. Perhaps it is one of the strongest evidences that Browning is a genuine philosopher, and not a prestidigitator of philosophy in rhyme, that Mrs. Browning's love poetry does not conclude with the note either of tragic insatiability or of disillusionment. [Footnote: The tragedy of incapacity to return one's poet-lover's passion is the theme of Alice Meynell'sThe Poet and his Wife. On the same theme are the following: Amelia Josephine Burr,Anne Hathaway's Cottage(1914); C. J. Druce,The Dark Lady to Shakespeare(1919); Karle Wilson Baker,Keats and Fanny Brawne(1919); James B. Kenyon,Phaon concerning Sappho(1920).]
Since the poet's soul is more beautiful than the souls of other men, it follows that he cannot love at all except, in a sense, by virtue of the fact that he is easily deceived. Here is another explanation of the transience of his affections,—in his horrified recoil from an unworthy object that he has idealized. This blindness to sensuality is accounted for by Plato in the figure, "The lover is his mirror in whom he is beholding himself, but he is not aware of this." [Footnote:Phædrus, 255.] [Footnote: Browning shows the poet, with his eyes open, loving an unworthy form, inTime's Revenges.] This is the figure used in Sara Teasdale's little poem,The Star, which says to the pool,
O wondrous deep,I love you, I give you my light to keep.Oh, more profound than the moving sea,That never has shown myself to me.* * * * *But out of the woods as night grew coolA brown pig came to the little pool;It grunted and splashed and waded inAnd the deepest place but reached its chin.
The tragedy in such love is the theme of Alfred Noyes' poem on Marlowe,At the Sign of the Golden Shoe. The dramatist comes to London as a young boy, full of high visions and faith in human nature. His innocence makes him easy prey of a notorious woman:
In her treacherous eyes,As in dark pools the mirrored stars will gleam,Here did he see his own eternal skies.
But, since his love is wholly spiritual, it dies on the instant of her revelation of her character:
Clasped in the bitter grave of that sweet clay,Wedded and one with it, he moaned.* * * * *Yet, ere he went, he strove once more to traceDeep in her eyes, the loveliness he knew,Then—spat his hatred in her smiling face.
It is probably an instance of the poet's blindness to the sensual, that he is often represented as having a peculiar sympathy with the fallen woman. He feels that all beauty in this world is forced to enter into forms unworthy of it, and he finds the attractiveness of the courtesan only an extreme instance of this. Joaquin Miller'sThe Ideal and the Realis an allegory in which the poet, following ideal beauty into this world, finds her in such a form. The tradition of the poet idealizing the outcast, which dates back at least to Rossetti'sJenny, is still alive, as witness John D. Neihardt's recent poem,A Vision of Woman. [Footnote: See also Kirke White,The Prostitute; Whitman,To a Common Prostitute; Joaquin Miller,A Dove of St. Mark; and Olive Dargan,A Magdalen to Her Poet.]
To return to the question of the poet's fickleness, a very ingenious denial of it is found in the argument that, as his poetical love is purely ideal, he can indulge in a natural love that in no way interferes with it. A favorite view of the 1890's is in Ernest Dowson'sNon Sum Qualis Eram Bonæ sub Regno Cynaræ:
Last night, ah, yesternight, betwixt her lips and mineThere fell thy shadow, Cynara! thy breath was shedUpon my soul between the kisses and the wine;And I was desolate and sick of an old passion;Yea, I was desolate and bowed my head:I have been faithful to thee, Cynara! in my fashion.
The poet sometimes regards it as a proof of the supersensual nature of his passion that he is, willing to marry another woman. The hero of May Sinclair's novel,The Divine Fire, who is irresistibly impelled to propose to a girl, even while he trembles at the sacrilege of her touching a book belonging to his soul's mistress, is only areductio ad absurdumof a rather popular theory. All narratives of this sort can probably be traced back to Dante's autobiography, as given in theVita Nuova. We have two poetic dramas dealing with Dante's love, by G. L. Raymond, [Footnote:Dante] and by Sara King Wiley. [Footnote:Dante and Beatrice] Both these writers, however, show a tendency to slur over Dante's affection for Gemma. Raymond represents their marriage as the result solely of Dante's compromising her by apparent attention, in order to avoid the appearance of insulting Beatrice with too close regard. Sara King Wiley, on the other hand, stresses the other aspect of Dante's feeling for Gemma, his gratitude for her pity at the time of Beatrice's death. Of course both dramatists are bound by historical considerations to make the outcome of their plays tragical, but practically all other expositions of the poet's double affections are likewise tragic. Cale Young Rice chooses another famous Renaissance lover for the hero ofA Night in Avignon, a play with this theme. Here Petrarch, in a fit of impatience with his long loyalty to a hopeless love for Laura, turns to a light woman for consolation. According to the accepted mode, he refuses to tolerate Laura's name on the lips of his fancy. Laura, who has chosen this inconvenient moment to become convinced of the purity of Petrarch's devotion to her, comes to his home to offer her heart, but, discovering the other woman's presence there, she fails utterly to comprehend the subtle compliment to her involved, and leaves Petrarch in an agony of contrition.
Marlowe, in Josephine Preston Peabody's drama, distributes his admiration more equally between his two loves. One stimulates the dramatist in him, by giving him an insatiable thirst for this world; the other elevates the poet, by lifting his thoughts to eternal beauty. When he is charged with being in love with the Canterbury maiden who is the object of his reverence, the "Little Quietude," as he calls her, he, comparing her to the Evening Star, contrasts her with the object of his burning passion, who seems to him the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil. He explains,
I serve a lady so imperial fair,June paled when she was born. Indeed no star,No dream, no distance, but a very woman,Wise with the argent wisdom of the snake;Fair nurtured with that old forbidden fruitThat thou hast heard of …… I would eat, and have all human joy,And know,—and know.
He continues,
But, for the Evening Star, I have it there.I would not have it nearer. Is that loveAs thou dost understand? Yet is it mineAs I would have it: to look down on me,Not loving and not cruel; to be bright,Out of my reach; to lighten me the darkWhen I lift eyes to it, and in the dayTo be forgotten. But of all things, far,Far off beyond me, otherwise no star.
Marlowe's closing words bring us to another important question,i. e., the stage of love at which it is most inspiring. This is the subject of much difference of opinion. Mrs. Browning might well inquire, in one of her love sonnets,
How, Dearest, wilt thou have me for most use?A hope, to sing by gladly? or a fineSad memory with thy songs to interfuse?A shade, in which to sing, of palm or pine?A grave, on which to rest from singing? Choose.[Footnote:Sonnets from the Portuguese, XVII.]Each of these situations has been celebrated as begetting the poet'sinspiration.
To follow the process of elimination, we may first dispose of the married state as least likely to be spiritually creative. It is true that we find a number of poems addressed by poets to their wives. But these are more likely to be the contented purring of one who writes by a cozy fireside, than the passionate cadence of one whose genius has been fanned to flame. One finds but a single champion of the married state considered abstractly. This is Alfred Austin, in whose poem,The Poet and the Muse, his genius explains to the newly betrothed poet:
How should you, poet, hope to sing?The lute of love hath a single string.Its note is sweet as the coo of the dove,But 'tis only one note, and the note is love.
But when once you have paired and built your nest,And can brood thereon with a settled breast,You will sing once more, and your voice will stirAll hearts with the sweetness gained from her.
And perhaps even Alfred Austin's vote is canceled by his inconsistent statement in his poem on Petrarch,At Vaucluse,
Let this to lowlier bards atone,Whose unknown Laura is their own,Possessing and possessed:
Of whom if sooth they do not sing,'Tis that near her they fold their wingTo drop into her nest.
Let us not forget Shelley's expression of his need for his wife:
Ah, Mary dear, come to me soon;I am not well when thou art far;As twilight to the sphered moon,As sunset to the evening star,Thou, beloved, art to me.[Footnote:To Mary.]
Perhaps it is unworthy quibbling to object that the figure here suggests too strongly Shelley's consciousness of the merely atmospheric function of Mary, in enhancing his own personality, as contrasted with the radiant divinity of Emilia Viviani, to whom he ascribes his creativeness. [Footnote: Compare Wordsworth,She Was a Phantom of Delight,Dearer Far than Life; Tennyson,Dedication of Enoch Arden.]
It is customary for our bards gallantly to explain that the completeness of their domestic happiness leaves them no lurking discontent to spur them onto verse writing. This is the conclusion of the happily wedded heroes of Bayard Taylor'sA Poet's Journal, and of Coventry Patmore'sThe Angel in the House; likewise of the poet in J. G. Holland'sKathrina, who excuses his waning inspiration after his marriage:
She, being all my world, had left no roomFor other occupation than my love.… I had grown enervateIn the warm atmosphere which I had breathed.
Taken as a whole, the evidence is decidedly in favor of the remote love, prevented in some way from reaching its culmination. To requote Alfred Noyes, the poet knows that ideal love must be
Far off, beyond me, otherwise no star.[Footnote: Marlowe.]
InSister SongsFrancis Thompson asserts that such remoteness is essential to his genius:
I deem well why life unsharedWas ordained me of yore.In pairing time, we know, the birdKindles to its deepmost splendour,And the tenderVoice is tenderest in its throat.Were its love, forever by it,Never nigh it,It might keep a vernal note,The crocean and amethystineIn their pristineLustre linger on its coat.[Footnote: Possibly this is characteristic only of the male singer.Christina Rossetti expresses the opposite attitude inMonna InnominataXIV, mourning for
The silence of a heart that sang its songsWhen youth and beauty made a summer morn,Silence of love that cannot sing again.]
Byron, in theLament of Tasso, causes that famous lover likewise to maintain that distance is necessary to idealization. He sighs,
Successful love may sate itself away.The wretched are the faithful; 'tis their fateTo have all feeling save the one decay,And every passion into one dilate,As rapid rivers into ocean pour.But ours is bottomless and hath no shore.
The manner of achieving this necessary remoteness is a nice problem. Of course the poet may choose it, with open eyes, as the Marlowe of Miss Peabody's imagination does, or as the minstrel in Hewlitt'sCormac, Son of Ogmond. The long engagements of Rossetti and Tennyson are often quoted as exemplifying this idiosyncrasy of poets. But there is something decidedly awkward in such a situation, inasmuch as it is not till love becomes so intense as to eclipse the poet's pride and joy in poetry that it becomes effective as a muse. [Footnote: See Mrs. Browning, Sonnet VII.
And this! this lute and song, loved yesterday,Are only dear, the singing angels knowBecause thy name moves right in what they say.]
The minor poet, to be sure, is often discovered solicitously feeling his pulse to gauge the effect of love on his rhymes, but one does not feel that his verse gains by it. Therefore, an external obstacle is usually made to intervene.
As often as not, this obstacle is the indifference of the beloved. One finds rejected poets by the dozens, mourning in the verse of our period. The sweetheart's reasons are manifold; her suitor's inferior station and poverty being favorites. But one wonders if the primary reason may not be the quality of the love offered by the poet, whose extreme humility and idealization are likely to engender pride and contempt in the lady, she being unaware that it is the reflection of his own soul that the poet is worshipping in her. One can feel some sympathy with the lady in Thomas Hardy'sI Rose Up as My Custom Is, who, when her lover's ghost discovers her beside a snoring spouse, confesses that she is content with her lot:
He makes no quest into my thoughts,But a poet wants to knowWhat one has felt from earliest days,Why one thought not in other ways,And one's loves of long ago.
It may be, too, that an instinct for protection has something to do with the lady's rejection, for a recent poet has openly proclaimed the effect of attaining, in successful love, one step toward absolute beauty:
O beauty, as thy heart o'erflowsIn tender yielding unto me,A vast desire awakes and growsUnto forgetfulness of thee.[Footnote: "A. E.,"The Fountain of Shadowy Beauty.]
Rejection is apt to prove an obstacle of double worth to the poet, since it not only removes him to a distance where his lady's human frailties are less visible, so that the divine light shining through her seems less impeded, but it also fires him with a very human ambition to prove his transcendent worth and thus "get even" with his unappreciative beloved. [Footnote: See Joaquin Miller,Ina; G. L. Raymond,"Loving,"fromA Life in Song; Alexander Smith,A Life Drama.
Richard Realf inAdvice Gratissatirically depicts the lady's altruism in rejecting her lover:
It would strike fresh heat in your poet's verseIf you dropped some aloes into his wine,They write supremely under a curse.]
There is danger, of course, that the disillusionment produced by the revelation of low ideals which the lady makes in her refusal will counterbalance these good effects. Still, though the poet is so egotistical toward all the world beside, in his attitude toward his lady the humility which Emerson expresses inThe Sphinxis not without parallel in verse. Many singers follow him in his belief that the only worthy love is that for a being so superior that a return of love is impossible. [Footnote: SeeThe Sphinx—
Have I a lover who is noble and free?I would he were nobler than to love me.
See also Walt Whitman,Sometimes with One I Love, and Mrs. Browning,"I never thought that anyone whom I could love would stoop to loveme—the two things seemed clearly incompatible." Letter to RobertBrowning, December 24, 1845.]
To poets who do not subscribe to Emerson's belief in one-sided attachments, Alexander Smith'sA Life Dramais a treasury of suggestions as to devices by which the poet's lady may be kept at sufficient distance to be useful. With the aid of intercalations Smith exhibits the poet removed from his lady by scornful rejection, by parental restraint, by an unhappy marriage, by self-reproach, and by death. All these devices have been popular in our poetry.
The lady's marriage is seldom felt to be an insuperable barrier to love, though it is effective in removing her to a suitable distance for idealization. The poet's worship is so supersensual as to be inoffensive. To confine ourselves to poetic dramas treating historical poets,—Beatrice,[Footnote: G. L. Raymond's and S. K. Wiley's dramas,Dante, andDante and Beatrice.] Laura, [Footnote: Cale Young Rice,A Night in Avignon.] Vittoria Colonna, [Footnote: Longfellow,Michael Angelo.] and Alison [Footnote: Peabody,Marlowe.] are all married to one man while inspiring another. A characteristic autobiographical love poem of this type, is that of Francis Thompson, who asserts the ideality of the poet's affection in his reference to
This soul which on thy soul is laid,As maid's breast upon breast of maid.[Footnote: See alsoAd Amicam,Her Portrait,Manus Animon Pinxit.]
There is no other barrier that so elevates love as does death.Translation of love into Platonic idealism is then almost inevitable.Alexander Smith describes the change accomplished by the death of thepoet's sweetheart:
Two passions dwelt at once within his soul,Like eve and sunset dwelling in one sky.And as the sunset dies along the west,Eve higher lifts her front of trembling starsTill she is seated in the middle sky,So gradual one passion slowly diedAnd from its death the other drew fresh life,Until 'twas seated in the soul alone,The dead was love, the living, poetry.
The mystic merging of Beatrice into ideal beauty is, of course, mentioned often in nineteenth century poetry, most sympathetically, perhaps, by Rossetti. [Footnote: SeeOn the Vita Nuova of Dante; alsoDante at Verona.] Much the same kind of translation is described inVane's Story, by James Thomson, B.V., which appears to be a sort of mystic autobiography.
The ascent in love for beauty, as Plato describes it, [Footnote:Symposium.] might be expected to mark at every step an increase of poetic power, as it leads one from the individual beauties of sense to absolute, supersensual beauty. But it is extremely doubtful if this increase in poetic power is achieved when our poets try to take the last step, and rely for their inspiration upon a lover's passion for disembodied, purely ideal beauty. The lyric power of such love has, indeed, been celebrated by a recent poet. George Edward Woodberry, in his sonnet sequence,Ideal Passion, thus exalts his mistress, the abstract idea of beauty, above the loves of other poets:
Dante and Petrarch all unenvied goFrom star to star, upward, all heavens above,The grave forgot, forgot the human woe.Though glorified, their love was human love,One unto one; a greater love I know.
But very few of our poets have felt their genius burning at its brightest when they have eschewed the sensuous embodiment of their love.
Plato might point out that he intended his theory of progression in love as a description of the development of the philosopher, not of the poet, who, as a base imitator of sense, has not a pure enough soul to soar very high away from it. But our writers have been able partially to vindicate poets by pointing out that Dante was able to travel the whole way toward absolute beauty, and to sublimate his perceptions to supersensual fineness without losing their poetic tone. Nineteenth and twentieth century writers may modestly assert that it is the fault of their inadequacy to represent poetry, and not a fault in the poetic character as such, that accounts for the tameness of their most idealistic verse.
However this may be, one notes a tendency in much purely idealistic and philosophical love poetry to present us with a mere skeleton of abstraction. Part of this effect may be the reader's fault, of course. Plato assures us that the harmonies of mathematics are more ravishing than the harmonies of music to the pure spirit, but many of us must take his word for it; in the same way it may be that when we fail to appreciate certain celebrations of ideal love it is because of our "muddy vesture of decay" which hinders our hearing its harmonies.
Within the last one hundred and fifty years three notable attempts, of widely varying success, have been made to write a purely philosophical love poem.[Footnote: Keats'Endymionis not discussed here, though it seems to have much in common with the philosophy of theSymposium. See Sidney Colvin,John Keats, pp. 160ff.]
Bulwer Lytton'sMiltonwas, if one may believe the press notices, the most favorably received of his poems, but it is a signal example of aspiring verse that misses both the sensuous beauty of poetry, and the intellectual content of philosophy. Milton is portrayed as the life-long lover of an incarnation of beauty too attenuated to be human and too physical to be purely ideal. At first Milton devotes himself to this vision exclusively, but, hearing the call of his country in distress, he abandons her, and their love is not suffered to culminate till after death. Bulwer Lytton cites thePhædrusof Plato as the basis of his allegory, reminding us,
The Athenian guessed that when our souls descendFrom some lost realm (sad aliens here to be),Dim broken memories of the state before,Form what we call our reason…… Is not Love,Of all those memories which to parent skiesMount struggling back—(as to their source, above,In upward showers, imprisoned founts arise:)Oh, is not Love the strongest and the clearest?
Greater importance attaches to a recent treatment of the theme by George Edward Woodberry. His poem,Agathon, dealing with the young poet of Plato'sSymposium, is our most literal interpretation of Platonism. Agathon is sought out by the god of love, Eros, who is able to realize his divinity only through the perfection of man's love of beauty. He chooses Agathon as the object of instruction because Agathon is a poet, one of those
Whose eyes were more divinely touchedIn that long-memoried world whence souls set forth.
As the poem opens, Agathon is in the state of the favorite poet of nineteenth century imagination, loving, yet discontented with, the beauty of the senses. To Diotima, the wise woman of theSymposium, he expresses his unhappiness:
Still must I mournThat every lovely thing escapes the heartEven in the moment of its cherishing.
Eros appears and promises Agathon that if he will accept his love, he may find happiness in eternal beauty, and his poetical gift will be ennobled:
Eros I am, the wooer of men's hearts.Unclasp thy lips; yield me thy close embrace;So shall thy thoughts once more to heaven climb,Their music linger here, the joy of men.
Agathon resolves to cleave to him, but at this point Anteros, corresponding to Plato's Venus Pandemos, enters into rivalry with Eros for Agathon's love. He shows the poet a beautiful phantom, who describes the folly of one who devotes himself to spiritual love:
The waste desire be his, and sightless fate,Him light shall not revisit; late he knowsThe love that mates the heaven weds the grave.
Agathon starts to embrace her, but seeing in her face the inevitable decay of sensual beauty, he recoils, crying,
In its fiery womb I sawThe twisted serpent ringing woe obscene,And far it lit the pitchy ways of hell.
In an agony of horror and contrition, he recalls Eros, who expounds to him how love, beginning with sensuous beauty, leads one to ideality:
Let not dejection on thy heart take holdThat nature hath in thee her sure effects,And beauty wakes desire. Should Daphne's eyes,Leucothea's arms, and clinging white caress,The arch of Thetis' brows, be made in vain?
But, he continues,
In fair thingsThere is another vigor, flowing forthFrom heavenly fountains, the glad energyThat broke on chaos, and the outward rushOf the eternal mind;…… Hence the poet's eyeThat mortal sees, creates immortallyThe hero more than men, not more than man,The type prophetic.
Agathon, in an ecstasy of comprehension, chants the praises of love which Plato puts into his mouth in theSymposium. In conclusion, Urania sums up the mystery of love and genius:
For truth divine is life, not love,Creative truth, and evermoreFashions the object of desireThrough love that breathes the spirit's fire.
We may fittingly conclude a discussion of the poet as lover with theEpipsychidion, not merely because it is the most idealistic of the interpretations of Platonic love given by nineteenth century poets, but because by virtue of the fact that it describes Shelley's personal experience, it should be most valuable in revealing the attitude toward love of one possessing the purest of poetic gifts. [Footnote: Treatment of this theme is foreshadowed inAlastor.]
The prominence given to Shelley's earthly loves in this poem has led J.A. Symonds to deny that it is truly Platonic. He remarks,
While Shelley's doctrine inEpipsychidionseems Platonic, it will not square with theSymposium…. When a man has formed a just conception of universal beauty, he looks back with a smile on those who find their soul's sphere in the love of some mere mortal object. Tested by this standard, Shelley's identification of Intellectual Beauty with so many daughters of earth, and his worshipping love of Emilia, is spurious Platonism.[Footnote:Shelley, p. 142.]
Perhaps this failure to break altogether with the physical is precisely the distinction between the love of the poet and the love of the philosopher with whom Plato is concerned. I do not believe that the Platonism of this poem is intrinsically spurious; the conception of Emilia seems to be intended simply as a poetic personification of abstract beauty, but it is undeniable that at times this vision does not mean abstract beauty to Shelley at all, but the actual Emilia Viviani. He has protested against this judgment, "TheEpipsychidionis a mystery; as to real flesh and blood, you know that I do not deal with those articles." The revulsion of feeling that turned him away from Emilia, however, taught him how much of his feeling for her had entered into the poem, so that, in June, 1822, Shelley wrote,
TheEpipsychidionI cannot bear to look at. I think one is always in love with something or other; the error, and I confess it is not easy for spirits cased in flesh and blood to avoid it, consists in seeking in a mortal image the likeness of what is perhaps eternal.
Shelley begins his spiritual autobiography with his early mystical intuition of the existence of spiritual beauty, which is to be the real object of his love throughout life. By Plato, of course, this love is made prenatal. Shelley says,
She met me, robed in such exceeding gloryThat I beheld her not.
As this vision was totally disjoined from earthly objects, it won the soul away from all interest in life. Therefore Shelley says,
She met me, Stranger, upon life's rough wayAnd lured me towards sweet death.
This early vision passed away, however,
Into the dreary cone of our life's shade.
This line is evidently Shelley's Platonic fashion of referring to the obscurity of this life as compared to the world of ideas. As the vision has embodied itself in this world, it is only through love of its concrete manifestations that the soul may regain it. When it is regained, it will not be, as in the beginning, a momentary intuition, but an abiding presence in the soul.
The first step toward this goal was a mistaken one. Shelley describes his marriage with Harriet as a yielding to the senses merely, in other words, as slavery to the Venus Pandemos. He describes this false vision,
Whose voice was venomed melody.* * * * *The breath of her false mouth was like sweet flowers,Her touch was as electric poison.
Shelley was more successful in his second love, for Mary, whom he calls the "cold, chaste moon." The danger of this stage in the ascent toward beauty is that one is likely to be content with the fragmentary glimpse of beauty gained through the loved one, and by losing sight of its other embodiments fail to aspire to more complete vision. So Shelley says of this period, "I was laid asleep, spirit and limb." By a great effort, however, the next step was taken,—the agonizing one of breaking away from the bondage of this individual, in order that beauty in all its forms may appeal to one. Shelley writes,
What storms then shook the ocean of my sleep,Blotting that moon, whose pale and waning lipsThen shrank as in the sickness of eclipse.
Finally, the dross of its earthly embodiments being burned away by this renunciation, ideal beauty is revealed to the poet, not merely in a flash of inspiration, as at the beginning of his quest, but as an abiding presence in the soul. At least this is the ideal, but, being a poet, Shelley cannot claim the complete merging with the ideal that the philosopher possesses. At the supersensual consummation of his love, Shelley sinks back, only half conceiving of it, and cries,
Woe is me!The winged words on which my soul would pierceInto the height of Love's rare universeAre chains of lead around its flight of fire;I pant, I sink, I tremble, I expire.
Dare we venture into the holy of holies, where the gods are said to come upon the poet? Is there not danger that the divine spark which kindles his song may prove a bolt to annihilate us, because of our presumptuous intrusion? What voice is this, which meets us at the threshold?
Beware! Beware!His flashing eyes, his floating hair!Weave a circle round him thrice,And close your eyes in holy dread—
It is Coleridge, warning us of our peril, if we remain open-eyed and curious, trying to surprise the secret of the poet's visitation.
Yet are we not tolerably safe? We are under the guidance of an initiate; the poet himself promises to unveil the mystery of his inspiration for us. As Vergil kept Dante unscathed by the flames of the divine vision, will not our poet protect us? Let us enter.
But another doubt, a less thrilling one, bids us pause. Is it indeed the heavenly mystery that we are bid gaze upon, or are we to be the dupe of self-deceived impostors? Our intimacy is with poets of the last two centuries,—not the most inspired period in the history of poetry. And in the ranks of our multitudinous verse-writers, it is not the most prepossessing who are loudest in promising us a fair spectacle. How harsh-voiced and stammering are some of these obscure apostles who are offering to exhibit the entire mystery of their gift of tongues! We see more impressive figures, to be sure. Here is the saturnine Poe, who with contemptuous smile assures us that we are welcome to all the secrets of his creative frenzies. Here is our exuberant Walt Whitman, crying, "Stop this day and night with me, and you shall possess the origin of all poems." [Footnote:Song of Myself.] But though we scan every face twice, we find here no Shakespeare promising us the key to creation of aHamlet.
Still, is it not well to follow a forlorn hope? Among the less vociferous, here are singers whose faces are alight with a mysterious radiance. Though they promise us little, saying that they themselves are blinded by the transcendent vision, so that they appear as men groping in darkness, yet may they not unawares afford us some glimpse of their transfiguration?
If we refuse the poet's revelation, we have no better way of arriving at the truth. The scientist offers us little in this field; and his account of inspiration is as cold and comfortless as a chemical formula. Of course the scientist is amused by this objection to him, and asks, "What more do you expect from the effusions of poets? Will not whatever secret they reveal prove an open one? What will it profit you to learn that the milk of Paradise nourishes the poetic gift, since it is not handled by an earthly dairy?" But when he speaks thus, our scientific friend is merely betraying his ignorance regarding the nature of poetry. Longinus, [Footnote:On the Sublime,I.] and after him, Sidney, [Footnote:Apology for Poetry.] long ago pointed out its peculiar action, telling us that it is the poet's privilege to make us partakers of his ecstasy. So, if the poet describes his creative impulses, why should he not make us sharers of them?
This is not an idle question, for surely Plato, that involuntary poet, has had just this effect upon his readers. Have not his pictures, in thePhaedrusand theIon, of the artist's ecstasy touched Shelley and the lesser Platonic poets of our time with the enthusiasm he depicts? Incidentally, the figure of the magnet which Plato uses in the Ion may arouse hope in the breasts of us, the humblest readers of Shelley and Woodberry. For as one link gives power of suspension to another, so that a ring which is not touched by the magnet is yet thrilled with its force, so one who is out of touch with Plato's supernal melodies, may be sensitized by the virtue imparted to his nineteenth century disciples, who are able to "temper this planetary music for mortal ears."
Let us not lose heart, at the beginning of our investigation, though our greatest poets admit that they themselves have not been able to keep this creative ecstasy for long. To be sure this is disillusioning. We should prefer to think of their silent intervals as times of insight too deep for expression; as Anna Branch phrases it,
When they wentUnto the fullness of their great contentLike moths into the grass with folded wings.[Footnote:The Silence of the Poets.]
This pleasing idea has been fostered in us by poems of appeal to silent singers. [Footnote: See Swinburne,A Ballad of Appeal to Christina Rossetti; and Francis Thompson,To a Poet Breaking Silence.] But we have manifold confessions that it is not commonly thus with the non-productive poet. Not merely do we possess many requiems sung by erst-while makers over their departed gift, [Footnote: See especially Scott,Farewell to the Muse; Kirke White,Hushed is the Lyre; Landor,Dull is My Verse, andTo Wordsworth; James Thomson, B. V.,The Fire that Filled My Heart of Old, andThe Poet and the Muse; Joaquin Miller,Vale; Andrew Lang,The Poet's Apology; Francis Thompson,The Cloud's Swan Song.] but there is much verse indicating that, even in the poet's prime, his genius is subject to a mysterious ebb and flow. [Footnote: See Burns,Second Epistle to Lapraik; Keats,To My Brother George; Winthrop Mackworth Praed,Letter from Eaton; William Cullen Bryant,The Poet; Oliver Wendell Holmes,Invita Minerva; Emerson,The Poet, Merlin; James Gates Percival,Awake My Lyre,Invocation; J. H. West,To the Muse,After Silence; Robert Louis Stevenson,The Laureate to an Academy Class Dinner; Alice Meynell,To one Poem in Silent Time; Austin Dobson,A Garden Idyl; James Stevens,A Reply; Richard Middleton,The Artist; Franklin Henry Giddings,Song; Benjamin R. C. Low,Inspiration; Robert Haven Schauffler,The Wonderful Hour; Henry A. Beers,The Thankless Muse; Karl Wilson Baker,Days.] Though he has faith that he is not "widowed of his muse," [Footnote: See Francis Thompson,The Cloud's Swan Song.] she yet torments him with all the ways of a coquette, so that he sadly assures us his mistress "is sweet to win, but bitter to keep." [Footnote: C. G. Roberts,Ballade of the Poet's Thought.] The times when she solaces him may be pitifully infrequent. Rossetti, musing over Coleridge, says that his inspired moments were
Like desert pools that show the starsOnce in long leagues.[Footnote:Sonnet to Coleridge.]
Yet, even so, upon such moments of insight rest all the poet's claims for his superior personality. It is the potential greatness enabling him at times to have speech with the gods that makes the rest of his life sacred. Emerson is more outspoken than most poets; he is not perhaps at variance with their secret convictions, when he describes himself:
I, who cower mean and smallIn the frequent intervalWhen wisdom not with me resides.[Footnote:The Poet.]
However divine the singer considers himself in comparison with ordinary humanity, he must admit that at times
Discrowned and timid, thoughtless, worn,The child of genius sits forlorn,* * * * *A cripple of God, half-true, half-formed.[Footnote: Emerson,The Poet. See also George Meredith,Pegasus.]
Like Dante, we seem disposed to faint at every step in our revelation. Now a doubt crosses our minds whether the child of genius in his crippled moments is better fitted than the rest of us to point out the pathway to sacred enthusiasm. It appears that little verse describing the poet's afflatus is written when the gods are actually with him. In this field, the sower sows by night. Verse on inspiration is almost always retrospective or theoretical in character. It seems as if the intermittence of his inspiration filled the poet with a wistful curiosity as to his nature in moments of soaring. By continual introspection he is seeking the charm, so to speak, that will render his afflatus permanent. The rigidity in much of such verse surely betrays, not the white heat of genius, but a self-conscious attitude of readiness for the falling of the divine spark.
One wonders whether such preparation has been of much value in hastening the fire from heaven. Often the reader is impatient to inform the loud-voiced suppliant that Baal has gone a-hunting. Yet it is alleged that the most humble bribe has at times sufficed to capture the elusive divinity. Schiller's rotten apples are classic, and Emerson lists a number of tested expedients, from a pound of tea to a night in a strange hotel. [Footnote: See the essay on Inspiration. Hazlitt says Coleridge liked to compose walking over uneven ground or breaking through straggling branches.] This, however, is Emerson in a singularly flat-footed moment. The real poet scoffs at such suggestions. Instead, he feels that it is not for him to know the times and seasons of his powers. Indeed, it seems to him, sometimes, that pure contrariety marks the god's refusal to come when entreated. Thus we are told of the god of song,
Vainly, O burning poets!Ye wait for his inspiration.* * * * *Hasten back, he will say, hasten backTo your provinces far away! There, at my own good timeWill I send my answer to you.[Footnote: E. C. Stedman,Apollo.The Hillside Doorby the sameauthor also expresses this idea. See also Browning,Old Picturesin Florence, in which he speaks "of a gift God gives me now and then."See also Longfellow,L'Envoi; Keats,On Receiving a Laurel Crown;Cale Young Rice,New Dreams for Old; Fiona Macleod,The Founts ofSong.]
Then, at the least expected moment, the fire may fall, so that the poet is often filled with naïve wonder at his own ability. Thus Alice Meynell greets one of her poems,
Who looked for thee, thou little song of mine?This winter of a silent poet's heartIs suddenly sweet with thee, but what thou art,Mid-winter flower, I would I could divine.
But if the poet cannot predict the time of his afflatus, he indicates that he does know the attitude of mind which will induce it. In certain quarters there is a truly Biblical reliance upon faith as bringer of the gift. A minor writer assures us, "Ah, if we trust, comes the song!" [Footnote: Richard Burton,Singing Faith.] Emerson says,
The muses' hill by fear is guarded;A bolder foot is still rewarded.[Footnote:The Poet.]
And more extreme is the counsel of Owen Meredith to the aspiring artist:
The genius on thy daily walksShall meet, and take thee by the hand;But serve him not as who obeys;He is thy slave if thou command.[Footnote:The Artist.]
The average artist is probably inclined to quarrel with this last high-handed treatment of the muse. Reverent humility rather than arrogance characterizes the most effectual appeals for inspiration. The faith of the typical poet is not the result of boldness, but of an aspiration so intense that it entails forgetfulness of self. Thus one poet accounts for his inspired hour:
Purged with high thoughts and infinite desireI entered fearless the most holy place;Received between my lips the sacred fire,The breath of inspiration on my face.[Footnote: C. G. Roberts,Ave.]
Another writer stresses the efficacy of longing no less strongly; speaking of
The unsatiated, insatiable desireWhich at once mocks and makes all poesy.[Footnote: William Alexander,The Finding of the Book. See also EdwardDowden,The Artist's Waiting.]
There is nothing new in this. It is only what the poet has implied in all his confessions. Was he inspired by love? It was because thwarted love filled him with intensest longing. So with his thirst for purity, for religion, for worldly vanities. Any desire, be it fierce enough, and hindered from immediate satisfaction, may engender poetry. As Joyce Kilmer phrases it,
Nothing keeps a poetIn his high singing mood,Like unappeasable hungerFor unattainable food.[Footnote:Apology.]
But the poet would not have us imagine that we have here sounded the depths of the mystery. Aspiration may call down inspiration, but it is not synonymous with it. Mrs. Browning is fond of pointing out this distinction. InAurora Leighshe reminds us, "Many a fervid man writes books as cold and flat as gravestones." In the same poem she indicates that desire is merely preliminary to inspiration. There are, she says,
Two states of the recipient artist-soul;One forward, personal, wanting reverence,Because aspiring only. We'll be calm,And know that when indeed our Joves come down,We all turn stiller than we have ever been.
What is this mysterious increment, that must be added to aspiration before it becomes poetically creative? So far as a mere layman can understand it, it is a sudden arrest, rather than a satisfaction, of the poet's longing, for genuine satisfaction would kill the aspiration, and leave the poet heavy and phlegmatic. Inspiration, on the contrary, seems to give him a fictitious satisfaction; it is an arrest of his desire that affords him a delicate poise and repose, on tiptoe, so to speak. [Footnote: Compare Coleridge's statement that poetry is "a more than usual state of emotion with more than usual order."Biographia Literaria, Vol. II, Chap. I, p. 14, ed. Henry Nelson Coleridge.]
Does not the fact that inspiration works in this manner account for the immemorial connection of poetic creativeness with Bacchic frenzy? To the aspiring poet wine does not bring his mistress, nor virtue, nor communion with God, nor any object of his longing. Yet it does bring a sudden ease to his craving. So, wherever there is a romantic conception of poetry, one is apt to find inspiration compared to intoxication.
Such an idea did not, of course, find favor among typical eighteenth century writers. Indeed, they would have seen more reason in ascribing their clear-witted verse to an ice-pack, than to the bibulous hours preceding its application to the fevered brow. We must wait for William Blake before we can expect Bacchus to be reinstated among the gods of song. Blake does not disappoint us, for we find his point of view expressed, elegantly enough, in his comment on artists, "And when they are drunk, they always paint best." [Footnote:Artist Madmen: On the Great Encouragement Given by the English Nobility and Gentry to Correggio, etc.]
As the romantic movement progresses, one meets with more lyrical expositions of the power in strong drink. Burns, especially, is never tired of sounding its praise. He exclaims,
There's naething like the honest nappy.* * * * *I've seen me daist upon a timeI scarce could wink or see a styme;Just ae half mutchkin does me prime;Aught less is little,Then back I rattle with the rhymeAs gleg's a whittle.[Footnote:The First Epistle to Lapraik.]
Again he assures us,
But browster wives and whiskey stills,They are my muses.[Footnote:The Third Epistle to Lapraik.]
Then, in more exalted mood:
O thou, my Muse, guid auld Scotch drink!Whether through wimplin' worms thou jink,Or, richly brown, ream o'er the brinkIn glorious faem,Inspire me, till I lisp and winkTo sing thy name.[Footnote:Scotch Drink.]
Keats enthusiastically concurs in Burns' statements. [Footnote: See theSonnet on the Cottage Where Burns Was Born, andLines on the Mermaid Tavern.]
Landor, also, tells us meaningly,
Songmen, grasshoppers and nightingalesSing cheerily but when the throat is moist.[Footnote:Homer;Laertes;Agatha.]
James Russell Lowell, inThe Temptation of Hassan Khaled, presents the argument of the poet's tempters with charming sympathy:
The vine is nature's poet: from his bloomThe air goes reeling, typsy with perfume,And when the sun is warm within his bloodIt mounts and sparkles in a crimson flood,Rich with dumb songs he speaks not, till they findInterpretation in the poet's mind.If wine be evil, song is evil too.
HisBacchic Odeis full of the same enthusiasm. Bacchus received his highest honors at the end of the last century from the decadents in England. Swinburne, [Footnote: SeeBurns.] Lionel Johnson,[Footnote: SeeVinum Daemonum.] Ernest Dowson, [Footnote: SeeA Villanelle of the Poet's Road.] and Arthur Symonds, [Footnote: SeeA Sequence to Wine.] vied with one another in praising inebriety as a lyrical agent. Even the sober Watts-Dunton [Footnote: SeeA Toast to Omar Khayyam.] was drawn into the contest, and warmed to the theme.
Poetry about the Mermaid Inn is bound to take this tone. From Keats [Footnote: SeeLines on the Mermaid Inn.] to Josephine Preston Peabody [Footnote: SeeMarlowe.] writers on the Elizabethan dramatists have dwelt upon their conviviality. This aspect is especially stressed by Alfred Noyes, who imagines himself carried back across the centuries to become the Ganymede of the great poets. All of the group keep him busy. In particular he mentions Jonson:
And Ben was there,Humming a song upon the old black settle,"Or leave a kiss within the cupAnd I'll not ask for wine,"But meanwhile, he drank malmsey.[Footnote:Tales of the Mermaid Inn.]
Fortunately for the future of American verse, there is another side to the picture. The teetotaler poet is by no means non-existent in the last century. Wordsworth takes pains to refer to himself as "a simple, water-drinking bard," [Footnote: SeeThe Waggoner.] and in linesTo the Sons of Burnshe delivers a very fine prohibition lecture. Tennyson offers usWill Waterproof's Lyrical Monologue, a reductio ad absurdumof the claims of the bibulous bard. Then, lest the temperance cause lack the support of great names, Longfellow causes the title character ofMichael Angeloto inform us that he "loves not wine," while, more recently, E. A. Robinson pictures Shakespeare's inability to effervesce with his comrades, because, Ben Jonson confides to us,
Whatso he drinks that has an antic in it,He's wondering what's to pay on his insides.[Footnote:Ben Jonson Entertains a Man from Stratford. See alsoPoe's letter, April 1, 1841, to Snodgrass, on the unfortunate results ofhis intemperance.]
No, the poet will not allow us to take his words too seriously, lest we drag down Apollo to the level of Bacchus. In spite of the convincing realism in certain eulogies, it is clear that to the poet, as to the convert at the eucharist, wine is only a symbol of a purely spiritual ecstasy. But if intoxication is only a figure of speech, it is a significant one, and perhaps some of the other myths describing the poet's sensations during inspiration may put us on the trail of its meaning. Of course, in making such an assumption, we are precisely like the expounder of Plato's myths, who is likely to say, "Here Plato was attempting to shadow forth the inexpressible. Now listen, and I will explain exactly what he meant." Notwithstanding, we must proceed.
The device of Chaucer'sHouse of Fame, wherein the poet is carried to celestial realms by an eagle, occasionally occurs to the modern poet as an account of hisAufschwung. Thus Keats, inLines to Apollo, avers,
Aye, when the soul is fledToo high above our head,Affrighted do we gazeAfter its airy mazeAs doth a mother wildWhen her young infant childIs in an eagle's claws.
"Poetry, my life, my eagle!" [Footnote:Aurora Leigh.] cries Mrs. Browning, likening herself to Ganymede, ravished from his sheep to the summit of Olympus. The same attitude is apparent in most of her poems, for Mrs. Browning, in singing mood, is precisely like a child in a swing, shouting with delight at every fresh sensation of soaring. [Footnote: See J. G. Percival,Genius Awaking, for the same figure.]
Again, the crash of the poet's inspiration upon his ordinary modes of thought is compared to "fearful claps of thunder," by Keats [Footnote: SeeSleep and Poetry.] and others. [Footnote: SeeThe Master, A. E. Cheney.] Or, more often, his moment of sudden insight seems a lightning flash upon the dark ways in which he is ordinarily groping. Keats says that his early visions were seen as through a rift of sheet lightning. [Footnote: SeeThe Epistle to George Keats.] Emerson's impression is the same; visions come "as if life were a thunderstorm wherein you can see by a flash the horizon, and then cannot see your hand." [Footnote:Essay on Inspiration.] Likewise Alexander Smith declares,
Across the midnight sea of mindA thought comes streaming like a blazing shipUpon a mighty wind,A terror and a glory! Shocked with light,His boundless being glares aghast.[Footnote:A Life Drama.]
Perhaps this is a true expression of the poet's feelings during the deepest inspiration, yet we are minded of Elijah's experience with the wind and the fire and the still small voice. So we cannot help sympathizing with Browning's protest against "friend Naddo's" view that genius is a matter of bizarre and grandiose sensations. [Footnote:Sordello.] At least it is pleasant to find verse, by minor writers though it be, describing the quietude and naturalness of the poet's best moments. Thus Holmes tells us of his inspiration:
Soft as the moonbeams when they soughtEndymion's fragrant bower,She parts the whispering leaves of thoughtTo show her full-leaved flower.[Footnote:Invita Minerva.]
Edwin Markham says,
She comes like the hush and beauty of the night.[Footnote:Poetry.]
And Richard Watson Gilder's mood is the same:
How to the singer comes his song?How to the summer fieldsCome flowers? How yieldsDarkness to happy dawn? How doth the nightBring stars?[Footnote:How to the Singer Comes His Song?]
Various as are these accounts which poets give of their inspired moments, all have one point in common, since they indicate that in such moments the poet is wholly passive. His thought is literally given to him. Edward Dowden, in a sonnet,Wise Passiveness, says this plainly:
Think you I choose or that or this to sing?I lie as patient as yon wealthy streamDreaming among green fields its summer dream,Which takes whate'er the gracious hours will bringInto its quiet bosom.
To the same effect is a somewhat prosaic poem,Accident in Art, by Richard Hovey. He inquires,
What poet has not found his spirit kneelingA sudden at the sound of such or suchStrange verses staring from his manuscript,Written, he knows not how, but which will soundLike trumpets down the years.
Doubtless it is a very natural result of his resignation to this creative force that one of the poet's profoundest sensations during his afflatus should be that of reverence for his gift. Longfellow and Wordsworth sometimes speak as if the composition of their poems were a ceremony comparable to high mass. At times one must admit that verse describing such an attitude has a charm of its own. [Footnote: Compare Browning's characterization of the afflatus of Eglamor inSordello, Book II.] InThe Song-TreeAlfred Noyes describes his first sensation as a conscious poet:
The first note that I heard,A magical undertone,Was sweeter than any bird—Or so it seemed to me—And my tears ran wild.This tale, this tale is true.The light was growing gray,And the rhymes ran so sweet(For I was only a child)That I knelt down to pray.
But our sympathy with this little poet would not be nearly so intense were he twenty years older. When it is said of a mature poetess,
She almost shrankTo feel the secret and expanding mightOf her own mind,[Footnote:The Last Hours of a Young Poetess, Lucy Hooper.]
the reader does not always remain in a sympathetically prayerful mind. Such reverence paid by the poet to his gift calls to mind the multiple Miss Beauchamp, of psychologic fame, and her comment on the vagaries of her various personalities, "But after all, they are all me!" Too often, when the poet is kneeling in adoration of his Muse, the irreverent reader is likely to suspect that he realizes, only too well, that it is "all me."
However, if the Philistine reader sets up as a critic, he must make good his charges. Have we any real grounds for declaring that the alleged divinity who inspires the poet is merely his own intelligence, or lack of it? Perhaps not. And yet the dabbler in psychology finds a good deal to indicate the poet's impression that the "subconscious" is shaping his verse. Shelley was especially fascinated by the mysterious regions of his mind lying below the threshold of his ordinary thought. In fact, some of his prose speculations are in remarkable sympathy with recent scientific papers on the subject. [Footnote: SeeSpeculations on Metaphysics, Works, Vol. VI, p. 282, edited by Buxton Forman.] And inMont Blanche expresses his wonder at the phenomenon of thought:
The everlasting universe of thingsFlows through the mind, and rolls its rapid waves,Now dark—now glittering—now reflecting gloom—Now lending splendor, where from secret springsThe source of human thought its tribute bringsOf waters.
Again, inThe Defense of Poetryhe says,
The mind in creation is a fading coal, which some invisible influence, like an inconstant wind, awakens to transitory brightness; this power arises from within, like the color of a flower which fades and changes as it is developed, and the conscious portions of our nature are unprophetic either of its approach or departure.
Wordsworth, too, thinks of his gift as arising from the depths of his mind, which are not subject to conscious control. He apprises us,
A plastic powerAbode with me, a forming hand, at timesRebellious, acting in a devious mood,A local spirit of its own, at warWith general tendency, but for the mostSubservient strictly to external thingsWith which it communed. An auxiliary lightCame from my mind which on the setting sunBestowed new splendor—[Footnote:The Prelude.]
Occasionally the sudden lift of these submerged ideas to consciousness is expressed by the figure of an earthquake. Aurora Leigh says that upon her first impulse to write, her nature was shaken,
As the earthPlunges in fury, when the internal firesHave reached and pricked her heart, and throwing flatThe marts and temples, the triumphal gatesAnd towers of observation, clears herselfTo elemental freedom.
We have a grander expression of the idea from Robert Browning, who relates how the vision ofSordelloarises to consciousness:
Upthrust, out-staggering on the world,Subsiding into shape, a darkness rearsIts outline, kindles at the core—.
Is this to say that the poet's intuitions, apparently so sudden, have really been long germinating in the obscure depths of his mind? Then it is in tune with the idea, so prevalent in English verse, that in sleep a mysterious undercurrent of imaginative power becomes accessible to the poet.
"Ever when slept the poet his dreams were music," [Footnote:The Poet's Sleep.] says Richard Gilder, and the line seems trite to us. There was surely no reason why Keats' title,Sleep and Poetry, should have appeared ludicrous to his critics, for from the time of Caedmon onward English writers have been sensitive to a connection here. The stereotyped device of making poetry a dream vision, so popular in the middle ages,—and even the prominence ofNight Thoughtsin eighteenth century verse—testify that a coupling of poetry and sleep has always seemed natural to poets. Coleridge, [Footnote: See his account of the composition ofKubla Khan.] Keats, Shelley, [Footnote: SeeAlastor, andPrince Athanase. See also Edmund Gosse,Swinburne, p. 29, where Swinburne says he produced the first three stanzas ofA Vision of Springin his sleep.]—it is the romanticists who seem to have depended most upon sleep as bringer of inspiration. And once more, it is Shelley who shows himself most keenly aware that, asleep or waking, the poet feels his afflatus coming in the same manner. Thus he tells us of the singer inPrince Athanase: